A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an
Era of Family Upheaval. By Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth. Harvard University
Press. 319 pp. $35.

The view of most family scholars and professionals—and probably also
of most adult Americans under the age of forty-five—is that parental unhappiness
is worse for children than parental divorce: better for parents to part
rather than expose their children to ongoing marital conflict and distress.
Amato and Booth fundamentally challenge this notion. A Generation at
Risk analyzes longitudinal child outcome data from a large national
sample of families, seeking especially to isolate the independent effects
of divorce on children from the effects of preexisting marital conflict.
Amato and Booth conclude that only 25 to 33 percent of parental divorces
today end up being better for the children than if the parents had stayed
together. By contrast, about 70 percent of divorces represent the termination
of low-conflict marriages that, whatever their shortcomings, are distinctly
better for children than the reality of divorce. Moreover, Booth and Amato
estimate that, as divorce becomes more socially acceptable, an even higher
proportion of future divorces will involve precisely those low-conflict
situations in which divorce is worse for children than the continuation
of marriage. This reasoning leads the authors to what today must be considered
a remarkable conclusion. For that 70 percent of marriages-in-trouble that
are not fraught with conflict, "future generations would be well served
if parents remained together until children are grown." And again:
"Spending one-third of one’s life living in a marriage that is less
than satisfactory in order to benefit children—children that parents elected
to bring into the world—is not an unreasonable expectation." This
from two left-of-center social scientists, some of whose earlier writings
have clearly suggested that one-parent homes are not especially harmful
for children. It has been ten years since Norval Glenn of the University
of Texas first observed that leading family scholars were becoming less
likely to view current family trends as benign or even beneficial, and
more likely to view them as socially harmful. A decade later, the shift
among the family scholars gathers momentum.

In the fall of 1997 Chief Shoefoot, a leading elder of a Yanomamo tribe
in the Venezuelan rainforest, visited numerous American colleges and universities
propounding a message not a few anthropologists and their student underlings
were loath to hear: namely, that since a majority of the members of his
village have embraced Yai Pada, the God of the Bible (literally, the Great
Spirit), and turned away from the vengeful spirits traditionally served
by the Yanomamo, they have enjoyed peace and relative prosperity—goods
all too seldom enjoyed among the rainforest’s "fierce people"
who have not yet abandoned their old religious ways. This book recounts
the conversion of Shoefoot’s village. It is also a polemic against academics
given to clucking that the likes of poor Shoefoot, who speaks through an
interpreter, has been duped by highly educated Westerners. At one meeting
in Northern California the chief was forthright when challenged. "I
wish more servants of Yai Pada would come to my village and that the anthropologists
would stay away," he said. "The anthropologists just make things
worse." And in one moment of exasperation Shoefoot observed that nosy
social scientists who discourage young Yanomamo from giving up their culture
of revenge could someday find themselves at a spear’s sharp end. Young
people considering missionary work and students of the social sciences
would do well to read Spirit of the Rainforest. All royalties from sales
go to the Yanomamo.

— Preston Jones

The Beast Reawakens. By Martin A. Lee.
Little, Brown. 546 pp. $24.95.

Just when you thought it was safe to say hello to the Baptist granny
a few doors down, Martin A. Lee, contributor to the Nation, Village
Voice, and San Francisco Chronicle, makes this chilling announcement:
"While U.S. neo-Nazis and the religous right [differ] in crucial respects,
they [see] eye-to-eye in their opposition to gun control, abortion, homosexuality,
nonwhite immigration, and other shared concerns." Pretty scary, huh?
Writing in the New York Times, Joshua Rubenstein notes that this
book, which aims to recount the rise of neo-fascism since the Second World
War, provides a "vivid survey of fascist resurgence." Vivid is
one word for it, especially when Lee, an award-winning creative writer,
connects dots lesser observers of contemporary America might have overlooked—like
the Christian Coalition’s "sympathy" for David Duke, for example.
Then there’s Pat Robertson’s "paranoid ideology" to worry about.
You probably weren’t aware of the link between "Robertson’s Christian
soldiers" who in the 1996 federal elections sought to "take over
the system from within" and militias who simultaneously "picked
up their guns." (Robertson’s support for Israel has "little to
do with sincere affection for Jews," surmises Lee, who cites an article
published in Freedom Writer rather than Robertson’s own work.) All
this evil has been "nourished by the odiferous compost of conspiracy
theory," of course. Which reminds one—did he say odiferous?—that the
only people more tedious than right-wing conspiracy theorists are their
left-wing counterparts.

—PJ

The Arrogance of the Modern: Historical
Theology Held in Contempt. By David W. Hall. Calvin Institute (Oak
Ridge, TN). 308 pp. $21.95.

The author takes no prisoners in this free-wheeling polemic laced with
considerable wit, and all in the service of vibrant orthodoxy in the Calvinist
tradition.

The title might suggest a polemic against recent welfare reforms, but
this book is anything but. Mead, whose work has appeared in this journal,
joins ten other public policy experts in arguing that the term "paternalism"
should be rehabilitated, that the radically dependent poor desperately
need programs that are unabashed in "imposing values" if they
are to straighten out their lives. Contributors include Chester E. Finn
and James Q. Wilson. A controversial and bracing book that makes a valuable
contribution to our understanding of what we owe the poor.

Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation
of Jewish Religion. By Will Herberg. Jewish Lights. 313 pp. $18.95
paper.

Reprint of a classic work of modern theology, first published in 1951.
Herberg, a former Communist and atheist, turned to God and became a devastating
critic of contemporary political ideologies, which he described as latter-day
forms of idolatry. Readers familiar with the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr
will find here a pervasive Niebuhrian influence; Herberg, in fact, studied
under Niebuhr and this work is in many ways a translation of Niebuhr’s
Protestant neoorthodoxy and political realism into Jewish terms. Though
Herberg’s religious existentialism never really connects with Jewish law
and practice as it is lived and understood within the Jewish community,
Judaism and Modern Man has nonetheless been instrumental in helping
many Jews return to both God and Jewish law, as Rabbi Neil Gillman indicates
in a new introduction for this edition. It remains a work of interest to
all people of faith.